India’s 50-Year Dry Spell Ends As Monsoons Strengthen Over Past 15 Years

The torrential rains of India’s celebrated summer monsoon could soon be a thing of the past amid fears climate change is replacing the wet season with drought. One of India’s leading meteorologists has given warning that in Central India the “days of long-duration rains are almost gone”. In a study of monsoon patterns in India over the last 150 years, BN Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said global warming had made India’s weather more unpredictable. He said there were now longer dry spells and shorter sudden heavy showers, replacing the three-month continuous rain which has characterised the Indian monsoon. —The Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2009

An MIT study published in Nature Climate Change finds that the Indian summer monsoons, which bring rainfall to the country each year between June and September, have strengthened in the last 15 years over north central India. This heightened monsoon activity has reversed a 50-year drying period during which the monsoon season brought relatively little rain to northern and central India. Since 2002, the researchers have found, this drying trend has given way to a much wetter pattern, with stronger monsoons supplying much-needed rain, along with powerful, damaging floods, to the populous north central region of India. —India New England News, 8 August 2017

The Indian summer monsoon is a robust regional climate event and is governed by large-scale atmosphere–ocean features such as the ENSO cycle. There are major occurrences of flood and drought throughout the excellent 200- year-long record of monsoon rainfall. Such events, either nationwide or localised, are governed by natural interannual variability and do not appear to be impacted by the feeble forcing of manmade global warming and associated changes in the climate. –Madhav Khandekar, Fllods and Droughts in the Indian Monsoon, GWPF Briefing paper 2014

Amelia Sharman, a researcher at the LSE (although now moved onto pastures new) has written a number of papers about climate skepticism and, rare among people working in this area, is professional enough not to lard her papers with derogatory references to “deniers”. Her papers have attracted quite a lot of attention in the past. —GWPF Comment, 21 August 2017

A quarter-century after the collapse of the USSR, Russian farmers are finally poised to beat the record for grain production that the country set during the Soviet era. The harvest will total at least 130.7 million metric tons this year on bumper wheat and corn crops, said Vladimir Petrichenko, director general of Moscow-based consultant ProZerno. That would push production 2.6 percent above the previous all-time high in 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under leader Leonid Brezhnev. —Bloomberg, 21 August 2017

In a region rich with oil, gas and solar power, but very few coal resources, the surge in coal is surprising. Despite gas prices being low at the moment, coal is cheaper still. —John Everington, The National, 20 August 2017